Weekly Round Up Reviews - 2.6.22

2.6.22 -  The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Marc Levinson (Book)

Whew, what a title. And what a book of similar stature. This wasn't the longest book ever but it sure felt like it in places. Levinson tells the highlighted history of the intermodal shipping container, with a big focus on the two decade period from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. This was a very intelligent book, but it was not....always the most interesting. In places it really shined. The focus on Malcolm McLean, a key figure in the development of container shipping, was great, and the overarching threads of "what the big picture of large-scale freight was, and what it transformed into during this key period of history", was really interesting in a lot of ways. But Levinson is not afraid to get into the nitty gritty details, and some of these gets more than a little dry. Even within each chapter I felt like there would be 5 pages that were engrossing, and then another 10 pages that dragggged on, and back and forth and back and forth. I would have loved a more Rich-Cohen-Banana-Republic style of narrative here (still my gold standard for how historical-topical non-fiction books can be as thrilling as well-written fiction). Read a good synopsis of this book, but I won't recommend it except to the most devoted of product-transportation nerds.